People are usually complex, and throughout history, other than at the extremes of the moral spectrum, few significant figures have been either all good or all bad. Most have led lives in which the good was mixed with the bad, to various degrees. Some otherwise bad people have done good things, that muddied the waters of history’s judgment of them, or eclipsed the bad altogether. And otherwise good people, have done terrible things that, likewise, muddied history’s judgment of them, or eclipsed their good deeds altogether. Following are twenty world-changing figures, who committed monstrous acts.
20. Erwin Schrodinger Impregnated His Teenage Students
Erwin Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, famous for his quantum superposition thought experiment in which a cat, sealed in a box with poison and radioactive material, is somehow simultaneously alive and dead, until the box is opened. Schrodinger also made serious contributions to the fields of quantum physics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, and cosmology. When he was not busy with scientific stuff, Schrodinger was living a depraved private life that would have landed him on a sexual offender registry today.
Erwin Schrodinger was married but found his wife unattractive, so he took on a string of mistresses. He also kept a series of black books, in which he detailed his sexual escapades. While morally repugnant, that was not criminal. What was criminal was the “lolita complex” ascribed to Schrodinger by biographers. Among other things, he groomed a pair of 14-year-old twins whom he was tutoring, by petting and cuddling them, before impregnating one of them. She was forced into a catastrophic abortion.
